March 5, 2001
Jefferson letter sparks debate on church-state
___By Bruce Nolan
___Religion News Service
___NEW ORLEANS (RNS) --It was the spring of 1804, and the Catholic Ursuline nuns of New Orleans were nervous.
___They were French and Spanish, like the other citizens of the colonial city where they had educated girls and cared for orphans for 77 years. But now the earth had shifted under them. Suddenly New Orleans was an American city under the terms of the recent LouisianaPurchase.
JEFFERSON
___Would the new government respect their property? Allow them to continue their work without interference?
___It would, President Thomas Jefferson assured them in a letter by his own hand on display at Ursuline Academy.
___In fact, he said in a passage with fresh implications for today, the Ursulines' laudable social work "cannot fail to ensure it the patronage of the government it is under."
___"Patronage"?
___Was the same Founding Father who coined the term "wall of separation" between church and state endorsing government support for what President Bush today would call "faith-based initiatives"?
___The question has begun to rattle around at the fringe of the policy debates over Bush's plan.
___"Old letter from Thomas Jefferson backs up Bush on government support for religious institutions," declared a recent headline on Spiritdaily.com, a private, religion-oriented website maintained by writer Michael Brown.
___Daniel Dreisbach, a Jefferson scholar and political scientist at American University in Washington, thinks that's a plausible reading of the letter.
___But other scholars disagree.
___They read Jefferson's language as a mere assurance of protection, no more. And they say efforts to make it more than that demonstrate how eager every side is during any important public debate to enlist the posthumous support of the mythic Jefferson, father of the Declaration of Independence.
___The letter sits today in a glass case in a dimly lit, second-floor exhibit at Ursuline Academy, the school the Ursulines founded shortly after their arrival in New Orleans in 1727.
___It evokes a simpler presidency, when chief executives were sometimes able to do business with distant constituents personally, by handwritten letter on plain, unlined paper.
OLD URSULINE CONVENT, NEW ORLEANS
___But great events were in the air too.
___New Orleans, founded as a French colony in 1718, had passed to Spain in 1762. Suddenly, in 1800, it was passed back to France, which quickly sold it to the United States, an unfamiliar government to the cloistered Ursulines.
___On March 21, 1804, the Ursulines' local mother superior, Sister Marie Therese Farjon of St. Xavier, wrote Jefferson, describing their work and asking whether the new government would confirm their ownership of their convent and school in the French Quarter.
___"The principles of the Constitution and government of the United States," Jefferson answered on May 15, "are a sure guarantee to you that it will be preserved to you sacred and inviolate, and that your institution will be permitted to govern itself according to its own voluntary rules, without interference from the civil authority."
___Moreover, he said, the Ursulines' mission in "furtherance of the wholesome purposes of society, by training up its younger members in the way they should go, cannot fail to ensure it the patronage of the government it is under."
___That sentiment betrays a pragmatist's streak tempering Jefferson's fierce separationist ideology, said Dreisbach, a Jefferson scholar and co-editor of "Religion and Culture in Jefferson's Virginia."
___"The record Jefferson established over a long career is one of 'non-absolute' separation, and there is much room in the joints to provide support, even financial support and encouragement, for religion and religious activities," he said.
___"Jefferson demonstrates time and again a willingness to use sectarian means to accomplish secular goals," as when he lent government assistance to small missionary societies bent on educating and "civilizing" Indians on the frontier.
___"That's very similar to a modern policy of charitable choice or faith-based initiatives as it's being proposed today--using proven sectarian initiatives to achieve secular goals," Dreisbach said.
___But that's a Jefferson other scholars do not recognize.
___"My instincts tell me that Jefferson would have had very grave concerns about charitable choice," said Derek Davis, director of Baylor University's J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies.
___"I think he would have believed that this was a subtle case of government going too far in advancing religion as a cure for the nation's ills."
___Davis and another scholar, Jeff Pasley, a historian at the University of Missouri, see in Jefferson's language to the Ursulines nothing more than a genteel tip of the hat and a general assurance that they can expect to operate free of government interference.
___True, Jefferson was a pragmatist willing to temper his ideology, both said. But, "to me, it's not even debatable," Davis said. "When he says they can count on the 'patronage' of the government, he's simply saying we support you, we applaud what you do, what you do is essential for building people of character, and we won't interfere with your ministry or mission. We will stay out of your hair."
___"He certainly had no idea he was proposing to fund the Ursulines," Pasley said.
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